5 Benefits of Parent Coaching for Today’s Families: Advice From a Parent Coach
We use the term “parent” to represent any adult who is in a caregiving role to a child or teen.
Parents wish for their children to be resilient and grow up to be productive adults with rewarding relationships. When parents witness their child or teen grappling with anxiety, irritability, sadness, meltdowns, defiance, or friendship challenges, it’s easy to worry about what this means for the future. Parents feel the need to do something to help but often do not know where to start. They might look into therapy services, but therapists who work with kids and teens are usually booked, especially for those coveted after-school spots.
Parents tend to underestimate their own capabilities in helping their child’s emotional functioning. It’s possible to better a child’s or teen’s sense of well-being even without securing direct mental health services for the young person. There is value in these services, but parents should know that they are their child’s best resource when it comes to building resilience and improving mental health.
Here are just a few ways that parent coaching at Child and Teen Solutions can improve family life and child mental health.
5 Benefits of Parent Coaching
Build Your Child’s Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence reflects the ability to understand one’s own feelings as well as the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence impacts emotion regulation, relationships, academic success, and sense of self. Children with high emotional intelligence are better equipped to cope with life's ups and downs. They develop resilience, learn healthy coping mechanisms, and are less likely to experience clinical levels of anxiety and depression. They are also less likely to react impulsively. Emotionally intelligent children can pause, think about their feelings, and make better choices in tough situations.
Although emotional intelligence is no doubt impacted by a child’s inborn wiring, it can also be nurtured and strengthened over time by the environment. Parents and caregivers can help children develop this essential life skill. Most parents are familiar with the importance of labeling emotions in their children, but building emotional intelligence goes even deeper and involves a strongly attuned parent-child relationship.
Parent Attunement: Emotionally Dancing with Your Child or Teen
Attunement is about being present, aware, and responsive to your child’s cues and signals. It involves not just recognizing their emotions, but reflecting them back in a way that shows you understand and are validating their experience. Attunement also means responding to your child’s emotional needs in a sensitive manner. When children feel seen, heard, and understood by their parents, they are establishing the internal foundations for emotion regulation and the skills to be attuned to others.
Our own experiences of attunement from others impact our capacity to attune to our own loved ones. Attunement is not just about naming a feeling. It’s about capturing the whole state. Rather than an observation such as, “You are sad,” attunement involves reflections such as, “You are sad about losing x, and you need y.” The idea is to tap into the child’s internal track, beyond the facts of what happened. A person’s internal track involves what the event means or signifies to the child. Your child may be calmed and relieved when you identify their needs at a given moment when they aren’t able to do this for themself.
Example of Misattunment
A misattuned response might look like this:
“Sorry to hear that you had a falling out with your friend today and I see you are sad, but I don’t think you need to worry because you have lots of other friends! Lots of kids like you, so don’t let this get you down.”
This is a well-intentioned response but might leave the child feeling dismissed and alone with their emotional pain. The child might feel that there is no space for negative feelings and that the parent needs the child to be happy for the parents’ sake. This response might also make it more likely that the child will shut down and tell their parent to stop talking.
Example of Attuned Response
A more attuned response might look like this:
“I’m glad you let me know about your falling out with (friend’s name) today. I know how important this friendship is to you and I can see how devastating this is and how you might be worried about this impacting your other friendships.”
This response conveys that you not only understand the immense emotional impact at this moment but also that you can tolerate seeing your child in emotional pain and not feel the need to fix their emotions. Sure, you can offer to help problem-solve but that is usually better received once your child feels you’ve connected with their emotions. When children perceive us as unable to tolerate seeing them hurt, or see us as needing to fix things, they are more likely to feel overwhelmed and avoid their emotions. Such avoidance patterns can get in the way of children listening to their emotional signals and using that information adaptively.
Validation Skills: Essential for Attunement
Validation skills are key to building on this idea of attunement. If you have a child who is highly emotionally reactive or who takes a long time to reset after an escalation, then there may be benefits to learning “advanced” validation skills. The emotion-focused therapy literature talks about the importance of using the word “because” instead of “but” when trying to validate your loved one. When we add the word “but” when attempting to validate, we undo the part of our statement that was validating.
For example, a statement like, “I can understand why it was disappointing to miss the movie but at least we still got to have ice cream,” is likely to leave the child feeling dismissed instead of validated. A more validating response might look like: “This is so disappointing! You’ve been looking forward to this movie all week because your friends have been talking about it and you’ve been wanting to join in the conversation! What a royal bummer.”
Keep in mind that while this kind of emotion coaching tends to work best when your child or teen is in the midst of difficult emotions, it may not work so well when your child is in a state of anger dysregulation or tantrums. Kids can’t process words at this time. Even skilled emotion coaching can backfire. It’s better to wait until things are calming down. Timing is key.
2. Build Your Emotional Intelligence
The way that we respond to our child’s emotions will become our child’s internal self-talk. We need to be well-versed in dealing with shame, perfectionism, and vulnerability in ourselves before connecting with our children around these themes. We can’t give to our kids what we don’t have. A parenting coach can guide you to build on your existing strengths and internal resources in ways that can better equip you to respond to your child’s painful feelings.
We often encourage parents to reflect on their relationship with their own emotions.
Who in your life do you feel best validates or understands your emotions? What is it about their responses that you really appreciate? How did your caregivers respond to your emotions? How attuned (connected) do you feel they were to your emotions? What did they miss or misunderstand about you? What might have gotten in the way of you sharing more with your parents (now or in the past)? How well do you validate yourself? What internal self-talk did you “inherit”? How safe was it for you to express your emotions as a child?
It’s not uncommon for parents to occasionally unravel when their child is acting out. Parents are more likely to dysregulate along with their children when they feel helpless, scared, frustrated, or otherwise at a loss. It can be helpful for parents to explore with a parenting coach what might be set off internally when their child is struggling. Does it relate to worries about your child’s future? Are you afraid they are going to turn out like their uncle who couldn’t hold a job? Do you feel that your child’s problems reflect poorly on you as a parent? Do you feel embarrassed or ashamed? Are you just plain tired of being late to things?
As parents build awareness about their own emotions, this can translate into better emotion regulation in the face of stressful child meltdowns or defiance. This improved resilience might even translate into less escalating interactions with your child or teen.
3. Reduce Parent-Child Conflict
Parent coaching can help you become more clear on when to set limits and when to let things go. Some issues, like wearing a seatbelt or bike helmet, are not negotiable. But when we take on too many battles, we end up in daily conflicts. Children become resentful, parents become resentful, and the conflict takes a toll on the parent-child relationship.
At the same time, we can’t have kids running the show just because we feel we are on eggshells. When it comes to fiery kids, this is a delicate balance for parents to navigate. With the help of a skilled parent coach, parents not only prioritize the issues where the limit setting is needed but also how to be more effective in this limit setting and reduce the chances of an epic meltdown in the child or teen.
4. Increase Unity Between Parents
In families with a struggling child or teen, it’s likely that parents will differ on parenting decisions and philosophy. These differences might reflect parents’ own family backgrounds, culture, education, mental health, etc. It’s common for parents to become polarized in their views around how to handle a problem with their child. When things are not going well, parents may disagree on what’s best because nothing seems to be working. It’s a lot easier to agree on parenting strategies when you have a child who is already doing well.
When parents become polarized, one parent might be seen as “too soft” while the other is “too hard.” One parent might try, in a sense, to compensate for the other parent being too hard or soft by going too far in the opposite direction. A tendency to blame the other parent may be part of this dynamic. Often, though, polarized views or feelings of blame reflect underlying feelings of vulnerability, self-blame, and helplessness in parents. By working with a parent coach, it is possible to soften these dynamics and build a more compassionate understanding of each other’s perspectives. At the core, parents want the same thing - for their child to thrive. A parent coach can help build parent agreement on how to target the troubling behaviors, which can help to reduce tension in the couple and mobilize a more coordinated parenting approach.
5. Improve Your Child’s Mental Health Trajectory
A child’s mental health trajectory is based on many factors, including but not limited to brain wiring and adverse childhood experiences.
Children who struggle with dysregulated irritability, for example, may have neurodevelopmental underpinnings to their tendency to be reactive and have meltdowns. These children are at higher risk of later challenges with anxiety and depression. There are parent-based interventions, however, that can be applied early in development to lessen this risk. These parent-based interventions can still be helpful at any stage of a child’s development.
When it comes to adverse life events, we may be able to buffer the impact by supporting children in making sense of what has happened. This “making sense of things” is a nuanced, complex process that involves processing narratives where themes such as shame and self-blame are explored and reworked. A secure parent-child attachment is key to this picture and may help with a child’s resilience over the long term even when really hard things happen. Parent coaching focuses on supporting parents in ways that can improve a child’s felt sense of security at home and in the family.
Why Parent Coaching Could Be the Key to Lasting Change for Your Child's Well-Being
We live in a time when therapy for kids is a common go-to solution for youths who are struggling with their mental health. Enacting change through coaching parents, however, can be at least as impactful, if not dramatically more so, than child therapy. Parents are their children’s secure base and an important source for building emotional resilience, intelligence, and comfort.
If you think that parent coaching is a direction that you would like to try, you can reach out to schedule an appointment with one of our therapists at Child and Teen Solutions in Seattle, WA. We typically offer parent coaching over telehealth and can serve families who live anywhere in Washington State. Start the process by sending us a message through our Contact page.
Create a Healthier Relationship With Your Child With The Help of Parent Coaching in Seattle, WA
Ready to make a lasting impact on your child’s well-being? Parent coaching in Seattle, WA can empower you to be a stronger source of support, resilience, and emotional growth for your child. Begin meeting with our team at Child and Teen Solutions in Seattle to start creating positive changes. Follow these three simple steps to get started:
1. Send us a message and we will get back to you to gather information and answer any questions you may have about parent coaching.
2. Our Client Care Coordinator will walk you through the steps for scheduling and preparing for your first appointment with a parent coach.
3. Start making an impact on your child’s well-being!
Additional Mental Health Services Provided by Child and Teen Solutions
CATS offers comprehensive support tailored to meet the unique needs of every family member. We provide a range of services, including parent coaching, to help you build a stronger relationship with your child. Our specialized services for young individuals support them in areas such as self-regulation, ADHD, autism/PDA, emotional management, defiance, and anxiety. Additionally, for families with young children, we offer Theraplay, creating a shared experience for parents and children in therapy sessions. If your child or teen would benefit from working one-on-one with a therapist, please explore our child and teen service pages. In some instances, the same therapist providing parent coaching may transition to work directly with your child, or it may be beneficial to assign another CATS specialist to support them individually. For families seeking more insight into a child or teen’s development and learning profile, we also offer neurodevelopmental evaluations. We welcome and affirm all family structures and identities, including LGBTQ+ individuals, in every aspect of our care. Check out our blog for more articles like this!
